Yesterday for the 4th or 5th time (I've lost count) HostGator and most EIG-based brands (think BlueHost, JustHost, etc...) experienced another one of their infamous multi-hour outages in their Provo, UT based data center. The reasoning behind this most recent outage appears to have been an issue with one of their core routers and the firmware on said router. They claim the issue was an undocumented bug in the firmware running on the router, and as such took a massive amount of time to resolve the issue. While this may be understandable for some, it is not for many. Hundreds if not thousands of websites, dedicated servers and VPS' went down for almost 24 hours.

Many people suggest these issues stem from the fact that HostGator (and other brands) were purchased and destroyed by the all-evil EIG (Endurance International Group). I too have seen how EIG purchases up companies and takes anything good from them and ruins them. The forced move from SoftLayer/The Planet for HostGator to EIGs own data center in Provo is a very good example of them trying to save a buck, rather than do it correctly. They even, in fact run reseller servers in groups of 4-6 on a single server in a virtualized environment. It's even rumored that dedicated servers are running in a virtualized environment with multiple hosts on a single piece of hardware. They claim it'll allow for easier management, but likely it's to save a dollar.

At this point in time HostGator has become your typical crappy bargain web host. I will not continue to recommend them to friends or colleagues or anyone for that matter. It's really too bad Brent couldn't have sold it (and ASO) to a more responsible company.

I have moved all my server and web hosting needs to the following fine companies: